SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Planning for Scalability

In order to scale MOSS, you have to think about which parts you can scale and also the costs you incur and benefits you gain in each scaling approach. In MOSS, you can scale in several different ways:

• Adding Web Front Ends (WFEs)

• Adding application servers

• Scaling and clustering the database

In Figure 4-1, I have broken our environment into three tiers: Web Front Ends, Application Servers, and Database Servers. Again, as discussed earlier, this entire picture can fit onto one single server. MOSS 2007 does make it easy to scale out. Later in the chapter, we will walk through the process of adding an additional server to our farm, but first I want to explain the different tiers and help you to understand the picture in Figure 4-1 more clearly.

The Web Front End's primary role is to render web content to the end user. Optionally, when you set up your search environment, a single WFE or multiple WFEs can also be used to query the Index server. Users interact directly with the Query server, and you can run it either on a dedicated server or on all WFEs.

Application Servers are where you set your various roles, such as Central Administration, Excel Services, Search/Index and Shared Service Providers.

Database Servers are your repositories for all that is SharePoint. What I mean is that SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server. A common question that comes up from time to time is "Where are the documents stored?" Plan your database implementation properly, and you will ...